Category Archives: Linux

Update 2017: I recommend using GMVault for backing up Gmail. It’s free, open-source, actively maintained, and relatively easy to setup if you’re technically inclined. Like all hosted services, you should never depend on one provider to both manage your data … Continue reading →

At VolunteerMatch we’re experimenting with using Chef Solo to manage Amazon EC2 servers. The catch is that if a server is going to rely on Chef to boot up, then the Chef Recipes (which we’re storing in a Git Repository) … Continue reading →

For the past 9 years I’ve been working almost exclusively with MySQL (with a little PostgreSQL thrown in) and while I don’t do nearly as much DBA work these days, I still find myself troubleshooting a query or tuning my.cnf. … Continue reading →

After 3 Ubuntu upgrades on my primary workhorse (a Lenovo Thinkpad z61t) I decided it was time for a fresh install to remove all the cruft. In the past I’ve always used 32 bit Ubuntu (even though my laptop is … Continue reading →

Update 2/2/07: Per Thomas’ comment I’ve released the code below as the dreamhost rails plugin. Update 1/25/07: People have reported difficulties copy and pasting the dispatch.fcgi source code from this blog post so here is a dispatch.fcgi to download. Make … Continue reading →

I’ve been reading all the great things about Amazon EC2 (or Elastic Compute Cloud) and lots of pricing comparisons with VPS and dedicated hosting. I finally got an EC2 account and tinkered a bit and there’s a big difference between … Continue reading →

Most systems administrators will tell you it’s important to partition your install into anywhere from 4-7 discrete patitions (or slices if you’re in the BSD camp). While I think it’s good advice in certain cases, the headaches of mis-guessing disk … Continue reading →

About Me

I live in San Francisco and am the Co-Founder of Two Bit Labs where we develop iPhone, iPad, and Android mobile apps for our clients. I love the mix of team leadership and working as a hands-on contributor. My technical passions include Swift, Kotlin, Ruby, Cloud Computing, and open-source software.

I also love to sail and my wife, daughter, and I sailed out the Golden Gate in 2007 on our 38 foot Hans Christian cutter (sailboat) on a 3 year cruise. Read about it at http://sailsugata.com.